Genres in T/P Writing

In my internship, I have written different kinds of documents. The genres range according to the context for which I am writing. Solicitation emails to readers and potential reviewers have a specific audience and tone for the writing. Writing, or rewriting, a stylesheet for the articles for the journal has been a large portion of my internship. This genre involves a specific set upof the material presented, usually to a particular kind of person in the workplace that knows how to interact with a stylesheet, follow its guidelines, and use it to format other genres of writing. Bawarshi and Reiff explain that workplace genres are different than academic genres in how they interact with their community and the ability to have more contributing depth and the fact that workplace genres are so often for a wider audience. A stylesheet for formatting journal articles, for example, could be read by anyone in that field and the reader would understand the setup of the message and what they were expected to do with the information.

Understanding a workplace genre does more than reading a solicitor email. The members of the journal understand the email asking for input from interested reviewers beckons a response if they find themselves interested, but a social genre like that does not necessarily require a response. Workplace genres, however, require a response more often than not due to the author’s and the readers’ responsibilities to their jobs. A document that will stay in shared files is open for fellow employees to contribute to, edit, and use for their own projects. Something like this will help keep more documents made by several different people have a specific and orderly continuity to keep the organization creating documents and genres as one entity together. In any organization that needs guidelines for certain kinds of documents can use stylesheets to keep multiple authors writing genres in the same fashion to help maintain the level of understanding of the genre itself, how to interact with it, and what to do with the document when written or received. Stylesheets are a genre that can help form genre requirements. If there are stated rules about how a certain document should look, then that will help with recognition of them in daily working activity.

Carolyn Miller describes the hierarchical levels of meaning and interaction with a genre, and a situation of meaning-as-action with a genre in Genre as a Social Action. It is like when a genre is understood and recognized, then it is already acted upon in its first way, leading to the understood interactions with it that the genre invokes. 


Bawarshi, Anis and Reiff, Mary Jo. Genre Research in Workplace and Professional Context.

Miller, Carolyn. Genre as a Social Action.